Comment by pjc50
5 days ago
This aspect of America has always struck me as the most bizarre: the most vicious enemies of the American state are Americans.
5 days ago
This aspect of America has always struck me as the most bizarre: the most vicious enemies of the American state are Americans.
I don’t think this is true. The world has plenty of anti-American sentiment, most of it well-deserved. What is unique about the phenomenon you describe is that Americans are extraordinarily misinformed and misguided about their own government and everything it does for them. This makes them particularly cynical.
We have Reagan to thank for it.
This is hardly bizzare but how governments everywhere work. People in power are not benevolent out of the goodness of their hearts but because the people from whom they derive their power - the population in a democratic state - continuously fight against overreach of their powers.
And it's not like this is a one-sided conflicts. Governments are actively working to suppress their citizens from standing up to them - by restricting free speech that would allow those citizens to organize, by trying to shape the thoughts of their citizens through various forms of propaganda and ultimately by doing everything they can to retain the state's monopoly on violence.
The thing is, this kind of anarcho-libertarianism is barely recognizable in Europe, or belongs to fringe left movements. In the US, it's much more right-coded and also tied to nationalism, while not being anti-military or anti-police.
"Defund the Federal government" is right-coded; "defund the police" is left-coded. No analysis connects the two.
> retain the state's monopoly on violence
Places like Italy know that when the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence, it gets messy ("years of lead").